The instant invention relates generally to instrumentation devices, and, more particularly to a meter box capable of displaying remote voltages or the voltage output of strain gage transducers used during the operation of complex electro/mechanical/pneumatic/hydraulic systems.
The field of instrumentation deals primarily with designing, manufacturing and utilizing physical instruments or instrument systems for detection, observation, measurement, automatic control, automatic computation, communication, or data processing. Instruments and instrument systems refine, extend or supplement human faculties and abilities to sense, perceive, communicate, remember, calculate or reason.
Instrumentation involves not only the design of individual instruments and components but also their integration with auxiliary or associated devices into instrument systems. In many instrument systems an auxiliary energy source, or field, is modified by the quantity to be measured, and a transducer is used to measure the modification. As an example, an x-ray beam penetrates a sheet of steel; the intensity of the emergent beam depends on, and is thus a measure of, the thickness of the sheet. An ionization chamber or a photocell transforms the ray intensity into electric current, which is further transformed into motion of the pointer on a meter. The position of the pointer is compared with a standard (the scale) which is calibrated in units of thickness. Vacuum pumps, x-ray tubes, lamps, batteries, electric signal generators (oscillators), sound or radio sources, radioactive sources, high-voltage electron or ion accelerators, wind tunnels, and shock tubes are all examples of equipment used to provide such auxiliary fields, beams, or conditions.
The general physical and mathematical principles underlying the operation of instruments and instrument systems are drawn from all branches of physics and engineering, primarily from physics. Instrumentation as a science is concerned with the development and study of these principles and techniques, their application to design of specific instruments, and the utilization of instruments in research, engineering, testing, industrial processes, communications, defense, education, and other areas. Thus the scope of instrumentation is nearly universal; in fact, it may well be called a common denominator of all science and technology.
Advances in science and technology make ever increasing demands on instrumentation. Every new area of investigation, for example, the exploration of space, generation of power by nuclear reactors, and determination of high-temperature properties of materials, presents new instrumentation problems. In general, instrumentation research seeks to attain higher accuracies, greater sensitivities, capability of measuring extreme values, applicability under extreme conditions of use, and capability of resolving changes or effects that occur at extremely high speeds.
A problem encountered in the many areas of instrumentation is that the expensive equipment in use today is being used inefficiently for required routine parameters at the expense of parameters requiring more costly equipment. It is therefore necessary to provide reliable, quick acting, inexpensive instrumentation for these routine parameters in order to release the more complex signal conditioning equipment for use by parameters requiring complex and expensive conditioning equipment.